Food from the Wild
Leaves
Bistort
Polygonum bistorta
The leaves are the main ingredient of a herb pudding formerly served with
veal and bacon. Eaten by people in the north-west of England at Easter, it is
to this period of the calendar that most of its other names refer-Easter
ledges, Easter mangiants and Passion dock.
The brush-like head of small pink and white flowers can be seen covering moist meadows on siliceous soils particularly in the north of England from June to August. This is after the traditional time for eating the leaves although it is still possible to cook them now. They can be boiled as a vegetable as well as made into pudding.
Easter Ledger Pudding
Pick young bistort leaves, dandelion, lady's mantle, or nettle and submerge
in boiling water for 20 minutes. Strain and chop. To the mixture add a little
boiled barley, a chopped hard-boiled egg, butter, pepper and salt and heat in
a saucepan. Press into a pudding basin to shape. Serve with veal and bacon.
Chickweed
Stellaria media
Tasting as fresh as young pea-pods, the leaves of chickweed can be boiled, as
you would spinach, for a vegetable or eaten raw as salad. Although chickweed
grows in profusion on waste and cultivated ground and is easily collected, it
is labourious to prepare. The stalks are too stringy to make pleasant eating
and separating the small leaves from them is a timeconsuming business.
However, since chickweed is common and grows almost the whole year round, it
is a vegetable source which can always be relied on. The small, white,
star-shaped flowers close up at night and at the approach of rain, and bloom
continuously.
Comfrey
Symphytum offinale
Wash well. Best used as fritters, rich mealy texture.
Common Mallow
Malva sylvestris
Mallow is reasonably common on roadsides and waste places throughout Britain
but more so in the south than the north. It has showy purple to pink flowers,
which bloom from June to September, and grows to a height of about 2-3ft.
The young furry leaves if picked and boiled make a wholesome although not particularly delicious vegetable, because of the glutinous substances in the leaves. A better way of preparing mallow is to make the leaves into soup. This is a common method of preparation in Egypt, where each family has its own personal recipe. Here is a version suitable for British kitchens :
Mallow Soup
Take 450g (1 lb) leaves and, discarding the stalks, chop them and boil in
about 1.1l (2pt) stock for 10 minutes. Make a sauce by gently frying 2
crushed cloves of garlic in some oil and adding 1 dessertspoon of ground
coriander, salt and pepper. Add the stock and simmer the whole mixture for a
few minutes, stirring occasionally. Serve the soup by itself or add meat and
vegetables.
Cow Parsnip
Heracleum sphondylium
A most useful leaf as it grows in bulk, is easily gathered and makes a
nourishing, if rather rough-tasting, food. The leaves are best boiled as a
green vegetable or made into soup using the recipe for nettle soup. The name
hogweed comes from its former use as fodder for pigs; the alternative, cow
parsnip, was given for no apparent reason by William Turner in 1548.
A relation of cow parsley, hogweed has larger, looser umbels of white flowers from June to September and larger leaves. It is found in clearings and grassland all over Britain.
Dandelion
Taraxacum officinale
Dandelion leaves are best when eaten as salad and, unless blanched, pick only
the young inner leaves of the plant. If the plant is blanched, all the leaves
are edible. This can be done in two ways: either place a pot over a growing
plant as you would for rhubarb, or bank the plant up with earth as for
celery.
A way of ensuring a supply of winter salad is to dig the roots in autumn, place them in earth in a covered box, leave them under the kitchen table or in a dark cupboard where they will sprout pale, sweettasting leaves. The roots are edible too. Dandelions are too common to require description; they grow anywhere and everywhere, and are cultivated by the French who give them the country name of pis-en-lit owing to the diuretic effect of the leaves.
Dock
Rumex spp.
Try not to scatter. Hard to eradicate once established
Leaf as sorrel.
Hairy bittercress
Cardamine hirsuta
Wash well. Identical in taste to watercress-and available everywhere.
Fat Hen
Chenopodium album
'Boil Myles in water and chop them in butter and you will have a good dish'
is an old English saying describing the best way of eating this wholesome
leaf which contains more iron, protein, calcium and vitamin B than cabbage.
Fat hen formed part of the last meal of Tollund Man, a fact revealed when the contents of his stomach were examined, after he was dug from his Bronze Age grave in the Sussex Marshes near Rye. It was also eaten by the Indians of New Mexico and Arizona.
It is found in waste places and cultivated ground and has a liking for manure heaps. Fat hen grows to about 1m (3ft), has lance-shaped leaves and tiny, greenish flowers which bloom between July and October.
Garlic Mustard
Alliaria petiolata
A well-named plant as its leaves do smell and taste distinctly of garlic. A
few leaves or many, according to taste, give zest to a salad and make an
excellent filling for sandwiches. Boiled hedge garlic is a Welsh speciality,
eaten with fried bacon and herrings. One of the first plants to appear in
spring, it is commonly found in hedgerows, has triangular, toothed leaves and
heads of white cruciferous flowers from April to June.
Good King Henry
Chenopodiun bonus-henricus
Easy to distinguish from other goosefoots. Use fleshy, soft leaf as spinach.
Ground Elder
Aegopodium podagraria
Although considered one of the most
troublesome garden weeds, ground elder is actually just sticking persistently
to the place where it was originally planted. It was first grown by monks in
medieval monasteries to, be eaten as a cure for gout, hence its other names
of goutweed, herb gerard, after the patron saint of gout, and bishop's weed,
probably because of its monastic association.
Boiled, it makes a parsley-flavoured green vegetable but it can be eaten raw
as salad, too. Thickets of the plant will be found in any shady place in or
out of the garden. It has elder-shaped leaves, the reason for its name of
ground elder, and creamy-white umbelliferous flowers in May and
June.
Nettle
Uritica dioica
Three dinners of nettles in April and May were believed by country people to
be necessary to purify the bloodand, after a winter's diet consisting of
salt meat and very few vegetables, it probably was. Analysis has shown
nettles to be the most nutritious of all wild vegetables; no wild plant
exceed: the nettle in its content of nutritive salts and vitamins. Apart from
this, when eaten young, nettles can make a succulent and tasty vegetable,
soup, pudding or stuffing.
Just the top two whorls of leaves from each plant should be picked, well before the plant begins to flower in June as, after this, they become gritty and inedible. Wear gloves to avoid being stung. The sting, which comes from formic acid contained in the hairs liberally covering the whole plant, is nullified by heat.
Scotch Nettle Pudding
To 4.5l (1 gal) young nettle tops, thoroughly washed,
add 2 good-sized leeks or onions,
two heads of broccoli or a small cabbage,
and 100g (¼lb) rice.
Clean the vegetables well, chop the broccoli and leeks and mix with the
nettles.
Place all together in a muslin bag in alternate layers with the rice, and tie
tightly.
Boil in salted water long enough to cook the vegetables, the time varying
according to the tenderness or otherwise of the greens.
Serve with gravy or melted butter.
Wild Vegetables and Salads, Mrs M. Grieve.
Soup
Sweat 1 large diced potato and a chopped onion in butter until the onion is
transparent. Add 2 good handfuls of nettles and
550ml (1 pt) stock.
Simmer for 20 minutes. Put through a vegetable mill or blender. Add 275ml
(½pt) milk, adjust seasoning, reheat and serve.
Vegetable
Put some washed nettle tops in a pan of boiling salted water. Cook for 15
minutes, drain, add salt, pepper and butter and chop all together over a low
heat. Serve.
Purslane
Portulaca oleracea
Salad leaf.
Rocket
Eruca sativa
Leaf in salad - tastes of roast pork.
Salad burnet
Sanguisorba minor
Leaf in salad - tastes of cucumber.
Sorrel
Rumex acetosa
Common all over Britain but especially in damp meadows, hedgerows and open
woodland, sorrel, a relation of the dock, has similar little red flowers
which bloom in May and June but smaller, arrow-shaped leaves. The French
think so highly of sorrel that they cultivate it and all the best recipes for
it come from France. The variety which grows wild in Britain is slightly
different, more acid in taste, but also delicious and it can be used in all
the same ways. The leaves can be added to salads, used as a sandwich filling
or chewed as thirst quenchers as they used to be by country people.
The mower in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina 'plucked a sorrel stalk and ate it' and in John Clare's Shepherd's Calendar 'the mower gladly chews it down, and slakes his thirst the best he may'. Sorrel leaves make an excellent soup and a puree which can be used as an omelette filling or a sauce. Traditionally served with goose or pork, rather bland meats like veal and sweetbread also benefit from its sharp taste. If eaten with fish such as mackerel and shad, it cuts the oiliness.
Green Sauce (to accompany cold meat)
Take a handful of sorrel leaves. Strip off any tough stalks, sprinkle with
sugar and chop finely. Put in a jug and pour over 1 tablespoon boiling water,
stir, then add enough vinegar to dilute.
Sorrel Puree
Remove any tough stalks from a couple of handfuls of sorrel leaves. Melt a
knob of butter in a pan and add the sorrel leaves, stir until they have
dissolved in a mush. Add 1 teaspoon flour and then some cream. Heat until it
boils and stir into a puree.
Sorrel Soup
To the puree made as above add 825ml (1½pt) stock or half stock and
half milk. Reheat, stirring all the time, and serve hot.
Watercress
Nasturtium officinale
Full of valuable, nutritive mineral of watercress can also be very polluted,
since it is largely composed of the water it grows in. It can even be
poisonous. Careful notice should therefore be taken of the habitat of the
cress you are picking. Common in running water, it bears small white flowers
between Maya nd October.
Wild cress is usually stronger than the garden variety and was valued as a scurvy preventative and thought to promote the appetite when eaten as salad. The Romans ate it with vinegar as a cure for mental complaints. Besides salad, watercress also makes a delicious soup.
Wild Cabbage
Brassica oleracea
All domestic cabbages, Brussels sprouts, and broccoli are derived from the
wild cabbage though probably from continental rather than British stock.
Selective breeding started early Pliny distinguishes between wild and
domestic cabbage in his Natural History, though originally all cabbage was
grown for medicinal rather than vegetative purposes.
Wild cabbage has few of the outward appearances of the domestic cabbage; a loose bunch of rather acrid-tasting leaves, they are best boiled or casseroled in the same way as the domestic variety but for a longer time as thorough cooking is necessary to remove the bitterness.
Not particularly common, the wild cabbage grows on sea cliffs in the south of England and Wales, has large grey leaves and yellow cruciferous flowers. These are easily confused with those of charlock, mustard, turnip and rape, all of which grow wild but mostly on arable ground and have good-sized, thoroughly edible leaves.
Charlock in particular was often eaten by the Hebridean islanders. The broad stalks were usually stripped from the leaves and cooked separately. It was also popular in Ireland and used to be sold in Dublin street markets during the eighteenth century.
Yarrow
Achillea millefolium
Aromatic and coarse textured, the ferny leaves of yarrow are most persistent,
making inroads even into Hyde Park in London. Finely chopped, the leaves are
often used as a substitute for chervil to add pungency to a salad or, if
picked during a walk, they can provide a satisfying stopgap for hunger.
Yarrow leaves used to be taken as snuff from which they acquired the name Old
Man's Pepper. Yarrow has bunches of small white and pink flowers which bloom
from June to August.
